The art of retouching

From touch_my_skin via sonjaaa (here):

You know how you always assume those fashion spreads in magazines are Photoshopped? You're right. But I bet you didn't realize to what extent. Wow.

Why Americans have SUVs and aren't going to give them up

bradhicks argues why Americans won't give up SUVs even though fuel prices are going up.

Interesting; I didn't know that estate cars/station wagons were fairly unpopular in the States; here in Germany, they're pretty common, I'd say, especially for families with children.

Incidentally, that entry is third in a series of "what American's won't do even though oil and gas[oline] prices are going up, and why not", and in general his journal has some readable rants on various topics; I recommend checking him out. (And thanks again to nou, who recommended him to me.)

Random observation

When searching for Maltese words and finding lots of other-language sites which happen to use an identically-spelled word, it's amazing how well you can narrow down to Maltese sites by adding "hu" to the search terms (since it's a word that occurs fairly frequently in Maltese—so that chances are good that the pages containing the word(s) you were looking for also contain "hu"—but infrequently in most other languages—so they are filtered out).

For example, just now I googled for "vuci", just for the heck of it, since the word popped into my mind. Brought up tons of Czech sites containing the word vůči, whatever that means (since Google seems to tend to ignore diacritics when searching, which can be both a boon and a bane, depending on what you want), but searching for "vuci hu" (without quotes) significantly reduced the number of Czech hits.

Searching for "vuċi" would have resulted into only Maltese hits in the first place, I suppose, but there are (or seem to be) many many web sites with Maltese that just drop diacritics, which searching for that term wouldn't have found those.